"The Venerable Bede's Art of Poetry and Rhetoric is a milestone in the transmission and adaptation of the classical principles of poetry and rhetoric to the changing needs of the medieval world. Bede...wrote the work as a textbook for use in his monastic school at Jarrow....It is in two parts. 'The Art of Poetry' is a guide to the most important meters of Latin poetry and offers practical instruction in the composition of Latin verse. 'The Figures of Rhetoric' defines some of the principal devices of rhetoric known to the Greco-Roman tradition and illustrates their usage with examples drawn from the Bible."--P. [4] of cover.